The present invention relates to a sandwich preparation apparatus. Conventional hamburgers have a meat patty in a bun along with various condiments and sauces. A variety of other types of hamburgers and sandwiches have been recently become popular and are in high demand at food outlets. These includes, for example, such items as teriyaki burger (adding teriyaki sauce to a conventional hamburger), bacon and lettuce burgers, cheeseburgers, fish sandwiches, chicken sandwiches and croquette sandwiches. New types and kinds of hamburgers and sandwiches are being introduced regularly. The words "hamburger" and "sandwich" are interchangeably used in this specification unless otherwise specified.
A demand for heightened productivity has arisen as a result of an increase in the number of consumers and increasingly diversified tastes. However, preparation of hamburgers and sandwiches has been mostly manually performed in conventional kitchen facilities which include a freezer for meat patties, a refrigerator for condiments, a broiler or grill for cooking food a toaster for buns, a deep fat frier, and a work table for manually fixing necessary food materials with a bun to complete a hamburger or sandwich. Each section is independent of the others. The productivity of the conventional kitchen facilities has been improved upon many times and has now reached an ultimate limit.
In order to solve the problem mentioned above, various types of automatic hamburger fixing apparatus have been developed. For example, the apparatus disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 1-91739 attempts to overcome the problem in conventional manual systems.
The above automatic hamburger fixing apparatus is, however, designed to fix only limited kinds of hamburgers and sandwiches. In order to prepare all of the kinds of hamburgers and sandwiches listed above, an apparatus must have feeding and adding mechanisms for each and every type of food material necessary for producing the hamburgers and sandwiches. This makes the apparatus bigger and requires a large space for installation. In addition, every time a new type of sandwich or hamburger is introduced, another mechanism for feeding the new food material has to be incorporated in the existing apparatus. The control system of the apparatus must also be modified accordingly. It is impossible to install such an apparatus in a conventional, relatively small kitchen, and it is difficult to install additional mechanisms and modify the control system for feeding the new food material. This is another problem.